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This is a great time to be a parent. Actually, please allow me to clarify that: This is a profoundly godawful fucking time to be a parent on almost every conceivable level (which might explain why fewer Americans than ever are choosing to have children), but — if you put aside the looming danger of authoritarianism, the prohibitive cost of childcare, the rising tides of ecological catastrophe, the brain-wormed fight to deprive people of miraculous vaccines, the national indifference towards mass shootings, the fact that our hyper-stratified economy is only being held together by sticky tack, and the imminent threat that “Wicked: For Good” poses to us all — it’s a great time to be a parent who watches a lot of new movies, if only because it suddenly feels like most of the really good ones are about us.
It goes without saying that stories of parenthood have been endemic to the medium since the silent age (“six reels of Joy” promised the poster for Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid”), but it’s hard to remember a time when the subject has dominated screens to the extent that it has so far this year. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” — a first-ballot inductee into the #GirlDad Cinema Hall of Fame, as well as a convincing argument that raising kids right can be a revolutionary act unto itself — is merely the most obvious example of a trend that was first seeded back at Sundance, and has only grown more pronounced across the last nine months.
Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby” confronted the harsh realities of bringing a child into this world, Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” crystallized the latent anxiety of keeping one alive, while everything from “Hamnet” and “Sirāt” to “Weapons,” “28 Years Later,” and “Highest 2 Lowest” were preoccupied with the uniquely excruciating potential of failing to do so. Arthouse favorites like Joachim Trier, Kelly Reichardt, and Park Chan-wook all delivered career-best work — or close to it — that focused on the psychic fallout of self-absorbed dads, while Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme” built on the mania of “Uncut Gems” by essentially positioning fatherhood as the biggest bet that someone could ever make on themselves (I’m using the past tense here, but I know that most of these movies aren’t out yet, and I promise I won’t write about them as if they were). Even American blockbusters like “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” were hung up on the ratio between risk and reward when it comes to starting a family, and it feels safe to assume that “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is gonna have a few more things to say about the perils of being a parent on Pandora (RIP Neteyam te Suli Tsyeyk’itan, forever in our hearts).
To some extent, this phenomenon — which also spans to include the likes of Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee,” Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “April,” Andrew DeYoung’s “Friendship,” Max Walker-Silverman’s “Rebuilding,” and Akinola Davies Jr.’s “My Father’s Shadow” depending on how hard you’re willing to squint — can be explained by the fact that a new generation of filmmakers have either arrived at parenthood for the first time (Joachim Trier), reached a point where they felt ready to reflect on the impact that it’s had on their worldview (PTA), or found themselves haunted by the prospect of creating new life at the end of history (everyone). The same logic might be used to explain why so many of these movies have resonated with critics of a similar age, even though few members of my cohort have kids of their own (a low-paying, high-event, ever-shrinking profession that’s almost exclusively available to people in cities with America’s highest cost of living doesn’t exactly lend itself to wanton reproduction).
Be that as it may, the rabid enthusiasm of parents and Pynchon heads can’t fully account for the megaton impact of a phenomenon like “One Battle After Another,” and — like any great film — to suggest that its true power was only available to a certain subset of the audience would seriously diminish its richness. (Yes, I’ve caught myself identifying as “the father of a daughter” while talking about this movie, and no, the fact that I’m consciously paraphrasing Matt Damon when I do it doesn’t absolve me from people rolling their eyes in response.) Indeed, the question of why so many significant directors have recently made films about parenthood is both less interesting than — and compellingly answered by — their undeniable relevance to a world in which parenthood has become less popular amongst/possible for most audiences than it’s been at any point in film history.
Perspective is the overarching crisis of the 21st century, and parenthood — which makes a person’s life infinitely bigger and smaller at the same time, like a dolly zoom that forces you closer to the world at the same time as it pulls you back away from it — is a singularly effective construct for illustrating how people function, or fail to, in a world whose horrors are so flattened by the screen in front of our faces that it’s deprived us of our depth perception. To quote a line from “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”: “Anything could be real, and anything could be bullshit, too.”
While Bronstein’s film — which opens in limited release today — is specifically keyed into the struggles of contemporary motherhood, parents of any kind are liable to recognize how viscerally “If I Had Legs” dimensionalizes the broader disquiet of having children. Non-parents too, for that matter. The story of an unraveling Montauk psychotherapist named Linda (a magnificent Rose Byrne) whose daughter has been suffering from a mysterious illness of some kind, the movie begins with a simple fact that’s rendered like a cosmic metaphor: The leak above the master bedroom in Linda’s house suddenly explodes into a hole so big that it seems like a portal into the heart of oblivion itself.
Forced to live in a rundown motel while the void is repaired, Linda begins to lose her grip on the distinction between what’s real and what’s bullshit. Everything that should be scary about her situation becomes hilarious (see: the scene where she buys her daughter a hamster), and everything that should be funny about her situation becomes deeply unnerving (Linda’s therapist is played by a mirthless and dead-eyed Conan O’Brien).
That confusion is further reflected by the manic hyper-subjectivity of Bronstein’s filmmaking, which boxes Linda into a close-up so tight that everything around her — especially her unnamed daughter, who almost never appears on screen — might as well be a disembodied echo of her own anxiety. Linda’s biggest problem isn’t that her little girl is sick, or that one of her patients is coming undone, or even that the receptionist at the motel refuses to sell her a bottle of wine when she needs it most. Her biggest problem is that everything seems like her biggest problem; the vertigo of her life becoming so much larger and smaller at the same time has made it impossible for Linda to maintain any sense of scale, to the point that her woes feel biblical and privileged in perfectly equal measure. Her responsibility to the world is so immense, and her power to fight back the rising tide of worry so impotent, that Linda can’t help but look out towards the ocean as if she were desperate for it to swallow her alive. In a society where having children no longer seems feasible, it’s only natural that self-obliteration should assume its own kind of logic.
Óliver Laxe’s similarly phenomenal “Sirāt,” which NEON will qualify in NYC and LA on November 14 before a nationwide rollout in January, is another film that uses parenthood as a lens through which to examine our response to — and distance from — a world in crisis. Pulverizing Andrei Tarkovsky and “The Wages of Fear” into a purgatorial shitstorm of braindead EDM, the unexpected Cannes stunner casts Sergi López as Luis, a heartsick dad who journeys into the heart of southern Morocco’s rave scene in search of his missing daughter.
His pre-teen son in tow, Luis joins up with a crusty group of dancers who are heading to a secret party in the heart of the desert, where the beats will be loud enough to drown out the sounds of the apocalyptic war that’s brewing around them. No spoilers, but let’s just say the drive there doesn’t go so well; logistical difficulties eventually give way to an unspeakable tragedy, which only leaves the ravers — Luis included — all the more eager than ever to sublimate themselves into the music. Alas, digging their heads in the sand doesn’t really solve anything. On the contrary, the sand might be hiding some very serious problems of its own.
The first 70 minutes or so of “Sirāt” are sustained by the hazy but haunting tug-of-war that Laxe creates between Luis’ desperation and the ravers’ denialism. The genius of the film’s explosive third act — a giddy masterclass in tension and release — is rooted in how Laxe uses it to braid those disparate energies together, as Luis begins to embrace his detachment from the world at the same time as his new friends become eager to rejoin it. The father straitjacketed by parental horror achieves a hollowed out state of total zen, while the untethered hedonists become too scared out of their minds to move in any direction.
Becoming a parent is by no means a moral act, and having kids doesn’t make Luis any more heroic than any of the other characters he meets on his trip to the heart of the desert. But through reframing the act of putting one foot in front of the other as a matter of life and death, Laxe effectively bends parenthood — the ultimate negotiation between being and nothingness, my problem and someone else’s — into a prism for how we all move through the world in a moment defined by omnipresent terror.
Functioning as a parent requires you to reconcile freedom and fear on a daily basis just in order to step out of your front door every morning; to fudge the data enough to balance the hope of having kids against the horror of having them here. Now. When the oceans are rising, genocide has been normalized, and generations of struggle have left even one-time revolutionaries like “One Battle After Another” protagonist Bob Ferguson to question the basic possibility of lasting progress. Reconciling freedom and fear on a daily basis isn’t something that Bob really knows how to anymore, and so the former demolition expert known as Ghetto Pat — now a single dad living with his 16-year-old daughter under a pair of aliases in the woodsy NorCal town of Baktan Cross — tends to stay inside, where the self-proclaimed “drugs and alcohol lover” spends all day getting baked out of his mind and wistfully re-watching “The Battle of Algiers” on TV.
Paralyzed from the fear that his past will catch up with him, and oblivious to the idea that teenage Willa might — as a partial credit to his paranoia — might be more equipped to fight it than he ever was, Bob refuses to let his daughter own a cell phone, and he interrogates all of her friends as if they were pimple-faced government spies. Once a radical leftist who helped to free undocumented immigrants from ICE-like detention centers, Bob has aged into a caricature of vintage conservatism; he’s suspicious of everything new, nostalgic for everything old, and altogether too defeated by the world to do anything but rue its continued existence (a feeling to which many of us on the other side of the political spectrum can surely relate).
When the past does indeed come knocking on Bob’s door, flushing him out of his home with shock troops and smoke grenades, Bob is forced to violently recalibrate his relationship to the present. Sixteen years of hiding in a cloud of pot smoke give way to a sudden immersion into the heart of modern American politics, as Bob’s scrambled efforts to reunite with his daughter and escape the government’s dragnet finds him swept up in the anti-immigrant raid that’s been staged as a pretense to flush him out.
Bob accomplishes exactly nothing during the frantic course of his pursuit of Willa (who, it turns out, is plenty capable of handling herself), but his lack of agency only intensifies the collision between the smallness of his life and the scale of the context that “One Battle After Another” provides for it. By the end of the movie, which is far more upbeat than the Thomas Pynchon novel that inspired it, Bob discovers that the villainous Colonel Steven. J. Lockjaw is a much smaller man than he’s ever been able to remember, and that his daughter contains multitudes that he’s never allowed himself to see.
By virtue of doing so, Bob arrives at a different — and much healthier — proximity to the modern world outside his window, as Paul Thomas Anderson’s biggest movie ends with the small but profoundly well-earned suggestion that kids can be the answer to our fears as opposed to the personification of them. That might sound a little too “the children are our future” for the rare movie that feels like it’s honest enough to meet the moment at hand, but “One Battle After Another” is less interested in offering reproductive propaganda than it is in leveraging the vertigo of parenthood to galvanize its revolutionary truths.
We live in a time when the internet has conditioned us to exacerbate minor differences into major atrocities, and reduce major atrocities into the content of a culture war; a time when civilization is hurtling into the future so fast that entropy is easy to confuse for inertia, and whatever empathy we feel towards each other is constantly frustrated by the collective sense that it will never be enough to save us from ourselves. It’s a time when having kids feels like the single most fearless thing a person can do, and raising them means being utterly terrified of what might happen to them every waking minute for the rest of your life.
A bleary-eyed burnout who gets so thrown off his axis by Lockjaw’s ambush that he literally can’t answer the question when someone asks him what time it is, Bob Ferguson is the perfect avatar for the panicked confusion of trying to fight for something at what feels like the end of the world. “Tranquilo,” Benicio Del Toro’s calm and collected Sensei tells Bob as he hurries dozens of undocumented immigrants to safety. “We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years.” By seeing how his daughter is able to pick up where he left off, Bob is able to absorb the wisdom of those words, and to reconcile his past and Willa’s future in a way that allows him to play a more active role in their shared present.
Anything could be real. Anything could be bullshit, too. Sometimes a little perspective is enough to make all the difference.
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